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Joined: 03 Oct 2013
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Managing time for CR
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14 Aug 2019, 02:35
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Getting through CR questions quickly can be quite a challenge to start with! Ideally, you should take just under 2 minutes per CR question on the GMAT, but this is obviously much harder to do organically than to simply solve the question with no time constraints. A couple of things can help you out however:
1. Every single CR argument is composed of just 3 different parts - Premises, Assumptions, Conclusion. If you can identify these elements of an argument while reading it, your job becomes much easier.
a) Premises are statements given to us within the argument which are to be taken as confirmed facts.
b) The Conclusion is the thing the argument is trying to convince us of. It is not confirmed, and its validity can be impacted by the answer options
c) Assumptions are statements believed to be true, but are not confirmed in the argument as they aren't stated. They often appear in answer options and impact the validity of the conclusion.
2. Always try to categorise the question first - It's essential to understand what the question requires you to do before diving in. Assumption/Strengthen/Weaken questions all require you to take the options as true statements and see how that impacts your conclusion, while Inference questions require you to question whether the options are true or not. This can require a lot of mental switching! However, if you figure out what the question type is early on, you will be clear in your thought process and rather than fighting a monster, you're just executing a bunch of steps.
3. Remember that the vast majority of GMAT CR questions can be solved by following just 5 steps. They are:
a) Read the question stem - 10s
b) Read the stimulus + ID the conclusion/what the author(or person mentioned) is trying to prove - 45s
c) Contextualise the argument/question so you know what kind of answer you're looking for - 15s
d) Eliminate ridiculous - 20s
e) Final Elimination - 30s
The exception to this is the Bold-Face question, but it is rare and merits its own discussion.
Once you recognise that CR questions are essentially just an execution of these five steps, the task becomes a lot more "paint by numbers" and you can set targets for how quickly you wanna finish questions.